Let's Try.

My husband didn't come home last night. He showed up this morning at 7 a.m. I get lost between when he is bamboozling me and when we are having communication problems and when I am paranoid and when he's trying to hurt me on purpose and when I'm deliberately misunderstanding him because I like to feel the special pain I get when I'm being hurt by him. It's comfortable and easy there.

This part is the hardest part yet, I think. I am afraid of other women, and I think my husband might be enjoying me being afraid. We both feel like we owe each other a lot of hurting.

I made this site private because he's been reading a lot, and he is particularly upset about my posts about marriage counseling, which I understand. I should have considered how he might feel if he read my posts about our private counseling sessions. It wasn't my intention to hurt him, but I see how it happened. I don't really know what to do next about this stuff.

I needed to write tonight, though. My husband has been scaring me with the spectre of other women. Maybe he's actually screwing around with other women. I've been crazy and he's been crazy, and all this not coming home and not calling or leaving a note is a new trick that I'm not ready to learn. I am in a lot of pain, and I don't know how to make it stop.

That's not true. I know how to make it stop. I have tools now. I have a lot of people who love me and who will take care of me when I am hurting. It's going to take time and be hard, but I will get better. There will be a way out.

When he finally came home this evening, he said that he wants us both to commit to trying to respect each other's feelings more. I am glad he's noticing that my feelings are getting trounced, and I am happy to try to respect his feelings more as well. I keep asking him to tell me specific things I can do to be more supportive, and he's not able to tell me much. I asked him for a few specific things, like showing me physical affection, holding me when I'm having a hard time, and trying to control his anger from turning into an outburst, and in spite of how bad the last few days have been, he has been trying.

I love him. He's hurting me, and I love him. I want this to stop, but I'm not ready to stop it. I don't know where I lost my will to leave, but it's completely gone right now.

I'm doing the best I can, though. I only have a little work to do tomorrow, so I'm planning to sleep in, go to yoga, eat good things, take a warm bath, and go easy on myself. I'm having a rough time, and I got some good advice from my sponsor tonight about being kind to myself. I know how to take good care of me, and I'll put it to work tomorrow.

Dear Husband,

Today has been a little better. I am feeling ok. A friend of mine from Nar-Anon has been struggling with her relationship, and we spent a lot of time together this evening. It was good to be able to get my mind off of you, us, me...

I think it's the first day in the longest time that I haven't fallen apart completely. I'm surprised. I still feel a deep, deep empty in the pit of myself, but I'm able to keep moving and overlooking it.

I am still talking about you, though, and thinking about you, and thinking about your problems as mine and my problems as yours, and our problems as the problems of a married couple. I'm not treating it as if we are moving toward becoming something different. I'm not feeling less married. Maybe it's too soon. You haven't even been gone a week.

I hosted a chat session at The Second Road tonight, and it was fun in a lot of ways, but in other ways, it was hard. I talked about you, and I talked about how things were before you came unglued. I am having trouble getting my mind out of that time. It was such good time.

More than anything in the world, more than anything ever, I want it back. I want you back, whole and healthy. I want the life we almost had.

That's the story of us, isn't it? The almost perfect, almost complete. It's infuriating, as I keep doing my part. I keep finishing the plan, but it doesn't work when it's only me. We make these stories for our shared future together, and I wish you'd find a way to make your part true, or achievable. I know it's not in your power when you're in your disease, though...you'd never say, "I'm going to be a heroin junky and be unemployed and parasitic and miserable for a couple of years!" Neither of us would have composed the story just this way...but I can't stop imagining the differences between what is and what could have been.

I miss you so much. I've been missing you for a long time now, though, and I know that having you back home won't bring You to me, the part of You that I recognized the first time I saw You, when it felt like the sun had finally come up in my life. You've got what's best in you all vaulted up, and no matter what I do, I can't get at that man. Even knowing it, though, I crave your physical presence. I want to see your face, smell you skin, taste you neck. My eyes are hungry and my hands hurt from being emptied of you.

I love you. I always will.

You Wife.

Dear Husband,

It's getting a little better every day, but still, at least for a few minutes each day, I feel like I can't breathe.

Today, for instance, there have been two times where I've lost my breath. The first was this morning. I went out with some friends for breakfast, and there is a duck pond by the restaurant where we ate. I was doing ok. These are friends in recovery, so it felt good to be among my people while I'm feeling so raw inside, and I felt as centered as I've felt since you left. But I stopped for a few minutes when I left to look at the geese and the beautiful, black swans, and it seemed like my heart might break. They were beautiful. You are beautiful. Beauty hurts my eyes now. I don't want to see beautiful things because I can't see my most beautiful thing.

And then there was a song. I'm at a coffee shop, and I'm trying to work. I haven't been able to get anything done all week, and I committed to myself that today, I'd get caught back up. I can't get financially behind, and I can't let my work pile up until it becomes an avalanche. I had great intentions of catching it all back up today and tomorrow, so I left the house (which honestly is feeling a bit haunted in your absence). I was working along pretty well, and then I hear that song by Amos Lee that you liked a few years ago called "Colors." Remember that song?

I know we all,
we all got our faults.
We get locked in our vaults,
and we stay..

When you're gone,
all the colors fade.
When you're gone,
no new years day parade.
You're gone,
colors seem to fade,
colors seem to fade.

I thought it was so charming how you liked that stupid, sappy song. Now, it reminds me of you walking around our first apartment together, singing. It reminds me of you grabbing me and throwing me down on the bed. It reminds me of the joy I found with you, the pure, sweet joy that we had before it got so ugly. God, remember the first day we were in that apartment together? Remember looking around and realizing it was going to be us, ours? Together!

I've also been pretty mad at you today, or at least mad at your disease. I've been hurting too much to be mad, so I'm hoping that getting angry will be progress. I woke up this morning with the word "parasite" in my mouth, and I had to say it out loud. It was beating its wings, and it needed to fly. You see, it makes me really, really angry that you're starting to be able to make a little money on your own, and that at the same time I'm getting good at enforcing my boundaries. What it feels like is that you've been sucking the life out of me, and as soon as I start to tell you, "No," and you start to be able to take care of yourself, you're casting me off. I don't like the idea that I've been a free house near the methadone clinic for you. I don't want to have been your host body.

But it is whatever it is, and I'm powerless over it. I kept going and going and going until the waters were rising up above my head, and I had to make a move. You're moving, and I'm moving. Maybe we'll move back together one day.

But today, what I want is the hooks you have in my heart to let me go. I want 24 straight hours of being able to breathe without feeling these panicked snakes crawling up my throat. God, I love you, and I hope you're ok. I hope we both are.

Love, love, love,

Your wife.

Every Farthing of the Cost.

Today, my husband kicked down the banister to the stairway, kicked the dog, threw a chair, called me a cunt, and told me that he's going to fuck another woman tonight in order to make sure that he never comes back to me again. He also threatened to kick in the door if I don't let him in when he comes back to get the rest of his things. It was very dramatic.

I took him to his parents' house, and that's that. I hope he stays.

He got himself very worked up because I wouldn't let him use my credit card to get car insurance. He had the money to give to me, and I still wouldn't let him use it. I'm afraid that next month, he won't have the money, and I'll get stuck with the bill (like always). He's also very hurt that I won't drive him to the methadone clinic in the mornings at the time he would like to go, and it's not good enough that I'm perfectly willing to drive him later. He's also very upset with the idea that I'm not willing to put his needs before mine anymore. He finds the idea abhorrent.

There is a part of me that is relieved that he's gone, and I'm hoping that his anger will fester long enough to keep him away. There is another part of me that is really deeply hurt. I never wanted our relationship to end. It saddens me that the tools I need to be able to live with him in his disease make him unable to stand living with me. Right now, he refuses to take responsibility for his own life. He refuses to live with me if I won't enable him, and it's really sad that he's that deep into his sickness.

It's sad that he can't see how messed up he is, too. I understand that he's struggling. He's trying to get a car, which seems like a real ticket out of a lot of the troubles he's gotten himself into; he's realizing he's not likely to be able to get this car with his arrest warrant and shoddy credit history. He's desperate for a loophole that will keep him from having to clean up the messes he's made, and he wants it to be someone else's fault. I hate to see him hurting so much, and I'm mad at his disease for taking away my sweet, sweet man. I want that man desperately.

I realized something today. While I was driving him to his mother's house, he was cursing me and saying all kinds of awful things, and it was hurting so, so badly. In the end, though, as much as it's hurt to have to pass through this awful time with him, I wouldn't trade a second of it. I love him, and I would take every bit of pain I've experienced as his wife to have had the opportunity to experience the other side of him. I risked a lot to be able to be with him, and it was worth it. I've known true love, real love, and I'm glad we had our time together. It was worth it.

It was worth it.

It was.

I still harbor hopes that we will be able to be together one day, that he will find maturity, responsibility, and real recovery. I don't know if it will happen, but I hope it will.

People in Pain.

Someone got hurt in my yoga class today, and it brought up all kinds of interesting things for me.

A woman was doing bridge posture, and her arm popped out of the socket. She is one of those folks, apparently, who has that happen a lot to her, but it was scary because she was upside down, and she got really upset.

I'm going to tell the rest of the story at The Second Road...so go there if you'd like to read more.

Bad Wife.

I had a rough afternoon and night tonight. My husband and I fought. We fought over something very small and stupid, and I tried to pick my words very, very carefully to avoid a fight. It makes me crazy when that doesn't work.

He'd found this sink. He wanted to bring it home. It's a very nice sink with two basins. It would be a lovely acquisition for someone with enough space for it, which we don't have, or for someone with the means to remodel a bathroom...also not us. We have had an increasingly large pile of stuff that he's been bringing home collecting in our front and back yards. It's been bothering me. I should have said that it was bothering me. I didn't say anything, or I said very little.

Today, though, the idea of dragging home a big, heavy sink to sit in the pile of stuff in our yard was too much for me. It's too big for me to move by myself. I can't count on him to put things away. There isn't much likelihood that we'd be able to put this sink to use at any point within the next several years, as I've accomplished something pretty impressive when I manage to pay the mortgage. I didn't want to come home from work every day to look at the sink, upside down, in my front yard. I didn't want for friends and neighbors to see this big-ass manifestation of our craziness, our financial failure, like a monument on the lawn. I don't want to look like trash. I said, so, so carefully, "I don't like the idea of bringing this sink home."

He gave me a long, long lecture about what a bad wife I am. It went something like this:

You know, when people would talk about how their wives were bitchy or how they couldn't do something because their wives wouldn't like it, I'd always wonder why they'd stay in the relationship. I never could imagine living with a woman who would control me and tell me what to do or always be pissed off at me. I never thought that you'd turn out this way. I didn't think that marriage with you would be like this. I guess I just had unrealistic expectations about marriage.

HE never thought it would be this way? HE never thought that I would turn out like this? He's put off by my behavior? HIS expectations of what marriage would be like have been disappointed?

Because he's been an Ace husband. He's done it by the book. I've had the life I've always dreamed of with him. When I was a little girl growing up, I always dreamed that one day a dashing man would come along, sweep me off my feet, marry me, and then rob me, lie to me, manipulate me, frighten me, threaten me, leach off me, scream at me, blame me. It's what I always wanted!

I was astonished. I couldn't even respond for a long time. I was hurt, and appalled that he would let an idea like that enter his mind, and even more that he'd launch it from his lips, seemingly without any notion of how crazy he sounded.

I'm a good wife. I'm a good wife to the point of making myself sick. I'm good beyond reason. Asking that we please not hoard trash in our yard after months of watching it grow is not "nagging." It's not being a "bitch." It's being sane, kind of, in that it's asking for some sanity in my life.

I want him to stop showing me that this relationship isn't working. I want him to stop pointing out with these grotesqueries that my life is unmanageable, unfair, and that he treats me badly. I don't want to know that it's not possible for us to live together. I don't want to face it.

I do, though, know that I deserve better than I'm getting. I deserve respect. I don't deserve to be cursed at, denigrated, intimidated. I've worked hard to keep us afloat for a long time while he's been out of commission, and I deserve some say in the state of the living environment I pay for.

I want so, so much for this marriage to work. I don't want to have to give him up. I don't want it. But I don't want to live like this anymore, either. I'm miserable so much of the time, and I want more for me. I want to choose myself, finally. I do.

I don't think I can do it.

A Side Of Pain With That Pain Sandwich.

I just had the most amazing meltdown. It was worthy of my college years, those coked-out whoring years of drunken depressive madness. I haven't thrown such a huge fit in a long, long time.

It's just that it's Christmas, and everyone is either dead or going to die. I am spending all my time working and hurting and being pissed off and having to force myself, to remind myself, to take care of myself...all while everyone and everything I love is either already dead or dying.

I wish I could spend every moment surrounded by everyone and everything I love or have loved in the past. Maybe this room full of approximately 50 beings could do yoga together or pray or eat Christmas dinner, but at least we could be together, and time wouldn't be passing by with everyone always in different rooms, dying. Maybe I could move the bodies of all my dead relatives and friends and pets and find all the things I've lost and missed and put them in the room, too.

I had forgotten that wild, panic-stricken feeling...that long, long corridor of life ahead and behind me with pain and pain and pain all along the way. There's pain behind. There's pain ahead. There's pain right now. There's pain everywhere, and I don't want to do anymore pain. I want to retire from pain. I want everyone to agree that I've met my pain quotient, and I don't have to do anymore hurting ever again.

All I ask is that if I love you, you stay close to me, forgive me for whatever wrongs I've done to you, and never die. Is that too much?

My death-filled mind quickly became consumed with the pain ahead and behind and present, and I went to a place I don't go much anymore...but it used to be my default mechanism for calming down when my emotions got the best of me: I wanted to hurt myself. I wanted to find a straight razor and slice my arms or my thighs or my feet or my stomach or anywhere that would hurt just enough and look just red and bloody enough to give me something to look at, some outward manifestation of the inward hurting, like a marker. Like a bookmark for my emotional page. Like a gravestone for a dying experience. Like a souvenir.

I also got increasingly upset that it's Christmas, and there's no one to talk to and nowhere to go, and then, slowly and surely, I realized that there was, technically, someone...there was that man who sleeps next to me. That man who lives in my house. I do, technically, pay for him to live in my house, so maybe it's not too much to ask for a little comfort while I've got a brainful of razor blades and death.

"I can't calm down," I tell him.

"What do you want me to do? Why are you mad at me?"

"It's not you. Or it is you. Everyone is going to die."

"No! Things are getting better! If you love me, you will see that things are getting better."

"I don't mean anything about you, or I do, but I mean I can't calm down and I need you to hold me."

"I don't know what you want me to say."

"I want you to hold me."

"You need to take an anxiety pill."

Handy addicts with their medicinal cure-alls...I avoid taking mood-altering substances as if, well, as if the need to take mood-altering substances had ruined my life. But this time, my sweet addict was right. Those razor-blade obsessing hissy fits are exactly what the anxiety pills are made for, so I took the pill he brought me, and I let him hold me and talk to me. He asked me if we could pray together, reminded me to focus, to breathe ("Don't they tell you that in yoga?"), to pray.

It was nice, and I feel better now. Perhaps it's the medication, and perhaps it's the comfort of my partner, and perhaps it's both...but either way, I feel more myself, less lost in that past and future nexus of despair, and ready to go to bed.